John Schettler - Lions at Dawn

Smart bomb munitions were central to the American bag of tricks in naval combat, but who was out there? How did it get here? He could not answer those questions. His mind was all focused on the adrenaline of fight or flight, and for Karpov every synapse in a situation like this screamed at him to fight.

“Helm, ahead flank and hard to port. Come to 145!”

This was going to cost him—big time—where missile inventory was concerned, but it was sink or swim now. The life of the ship and crew was at stake here. His own life, and all his heated aspirations, were on the line, in the crosshairs of those incoming wolfhounds. It wasn’t time, or fate, or the devious will of an opponent like Volkov that was gunning for him now. It was a string of glide bombs, mindless metal, yet seeking his life with their deviously engineered electronic sensors, both radar and infra-red.

“Rodenko,” he said, his voice controlled and steady. “Deploy all offensive ECM systems.”

“Aye sir.”

“Samsonov! Switch to full automatic and fire at the group bearing 045—salvos of six. Fire!”

“String of pearls!” shouted Hideo Honjo at the CIC aboard Takami . They had been watching the battle unfold in the phosphorescence of their own sensor suite, and saw that first missile targeted at the lead plane off Akagi . Their planes had taken the direct approach to the contact, while those off Kaga had moved off axis to come at Kirov from two other angles.

They saw the lead plane get hit, the crew reacting with disappointment. When the next Russian SAM salvo struck home, there was an audible reaction from the bridge crew. Harada looked over his shoulder, feeling the same as his crew did, but knowing he had to hold it all inside.

“See to your work,” he said sternly. “This fellow nearly took us out the last time we saw him, and we have to be damn good to survive out here. Now get it done.” Tensions rose in the silence that followed until Honjo shouted out that epithet—string of pearls. He was describing the ordnance being delivered by the strike planes, all lined up on his screen.

They saw the Russian ship firing again, this time throwing serious metal. They were ignoring Takami completely, their defense now a flurry of SAMs directed at those vampires.

“Good,” Harada said under his breath. “Throw your eggs, you bastard. You’ve got to be letter perfect now, and there’s 64 smart bombs heading your way. Anything you use now is one less missile under that deck when we get close enough to get in this fight.”

They watched, spellbound, as all of 64 JDAMs dotted the screen, descending from that high altitude towards the Russian ship. Then they picked up two more very fast contacts that the system identified as the Zircon SS-N-33s. Kirov must have thrown something their way, and he authorized the use of the best long range defense asset that might have a chance at getting them—his Standard Missile 3. They had been designed to get out after ballistic missiles inbound on a carrier task force, and the Zircon running close to Mach 6 was in that same speed category. It was now going to be a contest between the very best ship killer the Russian technology had designed, against the best defense the Americans had to offer.

RIM-161B did exactly what it was designed for that day. The missiles rose with alarming speed, tracking unfailingly as they sipped data from the network of sensors playing on those two Russian speed demons. But the SM-3 was the crown jewel in the US Aegis defense system, with a Mark 104 rocket boost sustainer that was capable of throwing that missile out at the dizzying speed of 5750 knots. The Block 1 version could make Mach 10. Block 2 and later versions could go even faster at Mach 15. It was a hypersonic killer the likes of which the world had never seen, and now the two sets of missiles closed on one another like bolts of lightning jousting in the sky. The SM-3 would have the hot minute to its credit that day. Both missiles ran true. The semi-active radar homing suite found the Zircons, tracked them accurately, and the SM-3s blew them to hell.

Harada breathed a sigh of relief. He was even surprised that Karpov had bothered to throw those missiles at him, but he had just showed his adversary that Takami could still fight, slapping aside the very best missile his enemy had. Now all he had to do was get close enough to let his own SSMs fly. The ordnance delivered by Kaga and Akagi was already in the air. Karpov had taken out all the JSOW missiles on those planes before they could deploy, but all the smart bombs were still inbound, and yes, Hideo Honjo had called the tune. He could see the GBU/53s strung out like a string of pearls in the sky.

A sleek bomb when it launched, the weapon deployed a pair of long thin wings to begin its glide into the target. They were not rocket assisted in any way, moving with the sheer momentum imparted by the plane delivering the ordnance. That momentum, the wings, and gravity were doing all the work, and it amounted to a deadly saturation attack on a single target like this. By now, all of Kita’s surviving planes off the Kaga had turned for home, but that first salvo of six Growlers fired by Samsonov went out after them, and he had followed up by adding two more at the end.

Of the four F-35’s in the eastern group, he would get two, the others evading and living to return to Kaga . Nothing had been fired at the planes in the northern group, and they would all escape to return home, for now Karpov had more to worry about than the planes. In less than ten minutes, those smart bombs would converge on his ship with a lethal attack from two directions. His decks were bristling with missiles, though he had very few of his longer range SAMs remaining. His second line of defense was the Klinok system, an upgraded version of the original missile, only with much extended range.

“Samsonov. Cease fire on the S-400s. Switch to the Klinok system and fire at will. Target the same eastern group. Now!”

In they came, and now Kirov’s defensive response was coming down to brief minutes of potential life remaining as the first salvo of missiles went out to challenge those glide bombs. The bombs had been delivered from a very high altitude to get the range required to reach their intended target. So they were coming down at a range above the Klinok / Gauntlet system until they got inside 40 nautical miles. As soon as the missile could reach them, Kirov started to fire.

The tension in that moment was extreme, and nowhere more intense than in Karpov’s mind. He had gamed attacks like these a hundred times on the simulators, and they were never pretty. Throw enough metal at a target, and something was bound to get through. Yes, something always gets through, he thought.

Yet in most scenarios he ran, he had faced ordnance packages of no more than 32 Wolfhounds inbound at any one time. Even then, the odds were still not good for the ship. This was why it was always imperative that you find and attack the incoming enemy strike group before it could get to their weapon release point. The JSOW Shotai off Akagi had to get to a range of 40 nautical miles to release, which allowed Kirov to see and kill them before they could get close enough to do harm. Yet they had not even seen the other strike groups off the Kaga until they were already releasing their bombs. That was mute testimony to the effectiveness of the F-35B as a stealthy aircraft. Those planes had flown right through the overlapping radar circles of both the Russian KA-40s, completely undetected. It was only when those weapons bay doors opened, enlarging their radar return, that they were finally seen.